hakfoo

17 ms·

301.
by hakfoo 2y ago
It would have been interesting to see what happened if it hadn't spun off, suddenly you'd have a huge Fortune 500 telecom where its side business was running a railroad. Would that have kept them afloat as an operation? I've
302.
by hakfoo 2y ago
I wonder if this could be a "money where your mouth is" thing for the EU. If controlling a browser engine was considered strategic-- and for the love of the darkness, anything that gathers that much information and is owned by Ame
303.
by hakfoo 2y ago
Maybe we're over-thinking with the monarch mindset. This also smacks of businessman "next quarter myopia" being applied to an unusually large stage. The domestic slash-and-burn, the foreign policy tarriff chicken, even the m
304.
by hakfoo 2y ago
The argument I could see is that even the least king has certain privileges that no tycoon in a democratic state offers. The obvious example I could see is just the concept of legal immunity. There's no need to deluge your critics wi
305.
by hakfoo 2y ago
That's what's fascinating. Given the capture of all three branches of government, they could presumably get all their wishes "above the board." Congress would willingly rubber-stamp shrinking the government to three nu
306.
by hakfoo 2y ago
The perceived return could be timing and presentation. If he has to spend the rest of his term negotiating back and forth over which flag flies over a particular outhouse in Western Crimea, he may not see that as being a successful deal-mak
307.
by hakfoo 2y ago
One aspect is likely that you get a "free" software ecosystem. They can presumably grab a bag full of MSX demos and freeware and drop it on the disc, their job is done. They don't even have to document the REPL (BASIC) sinc
308.
by hakfoo 2y ago
I'm rather fond of QMMP, because being built with normal Qt5 and a very vanilla stock theme, it integrates nicely into my "You're going to look like Motif come hell or high water" desktop theming philosophy. I also find
309.
by hakfoo 2y ago
I suspect it had a similar reputation as things like Fortran-- the principal use case defined it to such an extent that it prevents a breakout moment. An entire generation assumed "Ada is that weird bulletproof thing defense contracto
310.
by hakfoo 2y ago
For a "first dive" into a programming paradigm, I could see the appeal of something more "PC" shaped than "MCU shaped", just because it offers recognizable, easy ways to deal with primitive debugging. If you ha
311.
by hakfoo 2y ago
The idea of chat interfaces always seemed to be to disguise available functionality. It's a CLI without the integrity. When you bought a 386, it came with a big book that said "MS-DOS 4.01" and enumerated the 75 commands you
312.
by hakfoo 2y ago
I'd argue there is a lot of cost-scale issue. Blair Witch was achievable not just because it was low-tech but because the premise can be done cheaply. If I want to make (for example), a globe-trotting spy film, locations and travel are
313.
by hakfoo 2y ago
A flood of content has actively devalued media even before AI. In the era of "the cinema has fewer screens than an AI character has fingers", "big media" -- movies and TV -- were cultural touchstones. Everyone knows Luk
314.
by hakfoo 2y ago
Trade wars would make sense if it were two well-armed manufacturing powers, but the US showed up at a knife fight with a tuba. The problem isn't that people are saying "I'll buy the $2.50 Chinese widget over the $4.00 America
315.
by hakfoo 2y ago
One problem was also that the 2600, hardware-wise, had run its course. Some of the other contemporary consoles were a bit better, but most of them were well below the arcade games of the day. Yes, there are some impressive things being mad
316.
by hakfoo 2y ago
What's the ISP's motivations towards preventing BYOD? If they're desperate for the $10 per month box rental, I'm sure they could just levy a $10 per month BYOD "support fee" to make equal, but it sounds like in
317.
by hakfoo 2y ago
Every time I have any interaction with my bank accounts online, they seem to see it as an opportunity to try to cram paperless statements down my throat. Evidently they learned from the software industry that there's no such thing as
318.
by hakfoo 2y ago
We always forget that people actually consume services , not dollars . What if instead of a pension or Social Security delivered as a cheque, we provided a basket of highly subsidized services, essentially state-funded retirement homes?
319.
by hakfoo 2y ago
Are farms the future? I could see an "AI appliance" like the old Google Search Appliance: A single rack unit with a single $1000 GPU would probably be enough to run a pretty-robust DeepSeek style product, sold as "100% self-
320.
by hakfoo 2y ago
CEOs are replaceable by a bag of D20s. Let's not waste the watts on a LLM.
321.
by hakfoo 2y ago
Isn't the above-the-board justification for gain-of-function the promise of built-for-purpose microbes? The dream of "we spilled a million litres of toxic soup, here's a jar full of bacteria that eat that stuff and poop out
322.
by hakfoo 2y ago
The Olympics are choking themselves to death right now. I can recall sitting on the sidewalk watching the torch relay for Los Angeles 1984, but today the Olympics is just eighteen months of irritating ads followed by three weeks of media c
323.
by hakfoo 2y ago
Reminds me of when I was in university, and only had dial-up at home, so I bought a Zip drive for my PC, knowing the computer labs had the same, and I could take stuff home that way.
324.
by hakfoo 2y ago
There's a conceptually linked concept called the PAR (Payment Account Reference) which some payment systems return. You can't transact with it directly, but theoretically it refers to the same payment instrument whether you access
325.
by hakfoo 2y ago
Even without a leak, they face a risk with how actual CPUs bin out. They have to sell some $1000 CPUs at $600 as unlockable later to fulfill their contracts. But if their process is marginal, they may have to divert $1000 CPUs from the mar
326.
by hakfoo 2y ago
I always figured a better idea was to put a token tax on voice/VOIP telephony. A few cents per minute or even per connected call that crosses the border. This makes the unsophisticated scams that rely on spray-and-pray and low-take-ra
327.
by hakfoo 2y ago
I understand. The goal is to make the biggest possible pool, which means a single, preferrably government-run carrier (to limit profit-maximization on a service that's more or less essential)
328.
by hakfoo 2y ago
The math of insurance suggests that, if it needs to be widely carried (either due to things like mortgage requirements, or the simple realization most people don't have enough resources to absorb a major catastrophe themselves), the mo
329.
by hakfoo 2y ago
The industry is already a step ahead on this stuff. I'm sure they have reams of market research that say "If a tax appears that causes Coke to be $1.49 per litre and Diet Coke is $1.29, there's a nontrivial amount of custome
330.
by hakfoo 2y ago
Why build a model airplane if you can't fly it to JFK? Even as a pure hobby project, it has educational value. Being somewhat of a toy with simplifications and limits makes it understandable, but it's comprehensive and engaging e

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